The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.

In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980

Gary Winogrand

The Getty presents 30 photographs from the Museum’s permanent collection made in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980. Both iconic and relatively unknown works are featured by artists whose careers are defined by their association with the city, who may have lived in Los Angeles for a few brief but influential years, or whose visit inspired them to create memorable images. Works by Robert Cumming, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Man Ray, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, Garry Winogrand, Max Yavno and others are loosely grouped around the themes of experimentation, street photography, architectural depictions, and the film and entertainment industries. In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980 will be on view from December 20 to May 6, 2012. 

Speaking in Tongues

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was born in Staten Island, NY and came to Los Angeles with his parents when he was four years old. In 1955 he founded the small but influential mail art publication Semina – a brilliant, loose-leaf compilation of the most advanced artists and poets of his time, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jess (Collins) to name a few. Today, Berman is best known for his Verifax collages, softly sepia-colored works created with a forerunner of the photocopy machine. Influenced by surrealism, assemblage, and contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Andy Warhol, Berman produced multi-layered works that combined the picture of a hand-held transistor radio with images culled from newspapers and popular magazines. An exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, entitled Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, brings two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. This exhibition is concurrent with the Pacific Standard Time showing across Los Angeles in an en masse celebration of the Los Angeles art scene. Speaking in Tongues will on view October 2 to January 22, 2012.